“It struck the variety and breadth of his interests.” Rigor, originality, the Hölderlin Meridian: our debt to the Germanist, who passed away a month ago
In the “Maelstrom” of writing. It is the title of a short essay by Luigi Reitani on the novel The pianist by Elfriede Jelinek. This Maelstrom is the vortex that, at least from Romanticism onwards, sucks writing into a vortex in which it must be shipwrecked to bear witness to one’s own truth and the truth of the time, a pre-established disharmony. The shipwreck often appears as truth and destiny, the very essence of the writing of the Modern. If the narrative – and not just narrative – masterpieces of the twentieth century are failed masterpieces, as La Capria said, that failure is the sign of their greatness and their truth. Literature is a sinking Titanic which, precisely by sinking, tells the truth of the era, an era that despite the past years is still ours; the truth is perhaps the failure of progress as it was conceived and which seems to have become a deflagration.
In the Meridiano which he dedicated to Hölderlin – a masterpiece of criticism and historiography on one of the greatest classics and at the same time torn poets of universal literature – Reitani talks in depth about his work on those texts, both classic and more indecipherable than life itself. He delves into their discontinuity and into the torment of writing, “without wanting to present as completed what is not”. This incompleteness is still today the truth of our destiny, which leads us to ever more distant borders, to an elsewhere which, as the last line of a masterpiece such as Virgil’s death by Hermann Broch, is «beyond language».
It is this border area – in the most diverse texts and authors, in the cultures that bind and reject each other – the vast territory in which the extraordinary critical work of Luigi Reitani moves, incredibly wide and varied, meticulously rigorous and ingeniously original – soul and exactness, to use an expression of Musil. The first reaction, to the news of his death, on 31 October last, was a feeling of disbelief, the absurdity that this man, always traveling and always present, was no longer next to us, with his smile in which affection is intertwined. and irony, with his attention, with his generous and malicious intelligence, with his charge of sympathy in the strong sense of the word.
Personally I owe him a lot, in the not many years in which he gave me his friendship and his esteem. Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Udine, Reitani directed for two years, in a situation that was in many ways unpredictable, the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin, now led, amidst similar difficulties, by Maria Carolina Foi.
But this man of the house between the heavens and the earth of his travel has the gift of lightness and playful humor; Lat its home is literature but, first and foremost, his ability to befriend and above all his family, without which he probably would not have combined many important things not only for him. There is something very Italian about this great Germanist who loved to give the exquisite Apulian oil that comes from his home.
We owe many works to the Germanist – the list alone is impressive, it is already a small book – which soon made him a master of the discipline. First of all, the breadth and variety of his interests are striking. For example, Austrian literature, especially great authors but also little known and absolutely to be discovered, read or reread, also to realize that they often talk about today, of so many questions, contradictions, experiments and shipwrecks that we realize we still have to deal with. A variegated keyboard – Thomas Bernhard’s geometry of darkness and the art of dying, Ernst Jandl’s linguistic experiments, Modern classics such as Schnitzler, Trakl or Rilke, Paul Celan’s absolute, Vienna’s Jewish identity and topographies of the Shoah, famous or forgotten authors from the near or distant past, biting voices like that of Peter Handke, articles for dictionaries and many other writings.
And of course the Hölderlin Meridian. A philological, historical, critical work that delves into the totality not only of one of the greatest poets of all time, but of our history – yes, ours, all the more alive and turned to the future the more shattered already two centuries ago in destiny itself of the poet, like a star that explodes in the night, perhaps in a definitive darkness, perhaps in a new dawn. Already in the time of Hölderlin – but also today – those poems were and are “fragments of the future”, as Schlegel wrote in a passage that Reitani chose as the title of his introduction to the Meridian. It is since then that poetry, whatever form and structure present, can be, is in its essence – with respect to the world, life, history – only a fragment.
Luigi reitani wrote this great work in the pauses of his heavy and always complex work, pressed by all the difficulties that rained down on him continuously – not to mention the devastation introduced by Covid, which made and renders the work all the more difficult, complex and disrupted. At night Luigi worked without being overwhelmed by the feverish attack of the many organizational, bureaucratic, diplomatic and economic problems of the day.
The critical rigor is accompanied by lightness, the pleasure of reading and writing, that irresistible sympathy that is in his page, in his thought, in his face and in his smile. Reitani certainly owes a lot to the tireless work he did in the library or in the classroom, but even more to his smiling clarity, to the serenity that was felt in his family, in his wife Antonella and in his two daughters, who felt as much as they were his companions. of walking. We were able to greet and smile at each other in addition to the glass that separated us, shortly before his death, Antonella told me; a farewell that said, that says, in spite of everything, the harmony of a life.
Career
Germanist, translator and literary critic, Luigi Reitani was born in Foggia on 18 July 1959. Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Udine, Councilor for Culture and Tourism of the city of Udine from 2008 to 2013, director of the Italian Institute of culture in Berlin from 2015 to 2019, passed away on October 31st in Berlin Among the works of Reitani cited in the article by Claudio Magris, the essay In the “Maelstrom” of writing. Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Pianist” in the light of Michael Haneke’s film adaptation, in Elfriede Jelinek, The pianist, translated by Rossana Sarchielli, Milan, ES 2002 (second expanded edition, Einaudi 2004). Of particular note is the curatorship signed by Reitani of the Meridiano dedicated to Friedrich Hölderlin (Hölderlin, All the lyrics, Mondadori, 2001)
November 30, 2021 (change November 30, 2021 | 10:11)
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